Category Archives: Lunacy

Links and Comments: Bruni on ‘religious liberty’; love vs hate; godless kids do just fine; Biblical law; anti-science senators; Pinker on Shakespeare; io9 resources

Catching up: From a week ago Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Bruni, Your God and My Dignity. He captures better than I can the response to Jeb Bush’s demand to (as Michelangelo Signorile put it) ‘Respect’ My Opposition to Your … Continue reading

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Religious Evolution and Obsolescence

I’ve mentioned before that there is an evolution of policy stances by conservative and Republican politicians, because the environment — the American public — has shifted its majority opinion on issues such as gay rights and even same-sex marriage. Thus, … Continue reading

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Links and Comments: Mostly about the Evils of Religion, Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It

Tonight, many links and comments about religion, especially on this day when thin-skinned Muslim terrorists murdered French journalists who had dared to insult their omniscient, omnipotent god by drawing mocking cartoons about Muhammad. Some of the reaction has been to … Continue reading

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Links and Comments: Good News about the state of the world; cultural concepts; science; religion and fantasy

Catching up on links and comments from the past three weeks or so, given the holiday lapse. * First some Good News: Slate: Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack: The World Is Not Falling Apart In the world is getting more … Continue reading

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Links and Comments: Memory, Math, Church and State, Faith, Facts, Stories

New York Times: Why Our Memory Fails Us A fascinating NYT op-ed about the fallibility of memory, led by a notorious example from Neil DeGrasse Tyson. \/\/\/\/ Math Anxiety: Why Hollywood Makes Robots of Alan Turing and Other Geniuses How … Continue reading

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Recent Links and Comments: Ken Ham, Timothy Egan, Valerie Tarico, Adam Frank, Nathaniel Frank

I’m some two weeks behind on posting comments and links here, though I’ve been compiling such links for eventual posting. Website issues have preoccupied me. Here’s a first bunch of them. More tomorrow. 23 July: Salon: The Christian right’s 5 … Continue reading

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Today’s Odds and Ends: Conservative rejection of science; Christians’ perceived persecution; Dinesh D’Souza’s paranoia

There have been several articles in recent days about how people [conservatives] who don’t accept evolution or climate science don’t necessarily know less about those subjects than others… they do so because their “community” rejects such conclusions, by instinct. New … Continue reading

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Prothero on The Unpersuadables

Another review of a review: Donald Prothero (a geology professor at Occidental College in LA, and a lecturer at Caltech), has a review of a new book by Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, that develops … Continue reading

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Links, Quotes, Comments: 20 June

A post today by Amanda Marcotte, on both Salon and Alternet– Salon: Reason vs. the right: Have conservatives abandoned science and rationality? Alternet: Have Conservatives Abandoned Rationality, Skepticism and Truth? The possibility that rationality itself has become a partisan issue … Continue reading

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The Need to Feel Special

The scientific kerfuffle of the past couple days has been about a documentary supporting geocentrism (as if the creationists are not crazy enough), the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe, immovable, and that the sun and … Continue reading

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